This piece has multiple beginnings and no ending, which makes it the opposite of most blockbuster movies.

“The summer had crashed,” is a very good sentence in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and it came true as a hot July switched to a thundery, rainy, windy, cold August. God, who for a fictional construct can be a total dick, had decided to flip the dial to “November” to keep us on our toes, and Robin Williams killed himself. The guy who played Patch Adams committed suicide. I can’t even think of an analogy for that.

So we went to see GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY because a movie, even an indifferent one, kind of rapts you out of yourself — a friend who worked on it recommended it. I wasn’t sure I would like it but I figured either I would feel worse, and thus drive a car over my own head, or better. Instead I feel about the same, but the actual movie was OK.

What made me wary of it, apart from it being a mainstream release dated after 1980, was the reports that it has no story and everyone in it is an asshole. In fact, it has as much story as any of these things — a bunch of characters who want different things run around while stuff explodes — that’s the whole history of western literature right there, according to Stan Lee — there is an orb everybody wants, but it might as well have been a cube — and the characters’ obnoxious tendencies are actually explained/redeemed a bit as it goes on. And Groot, the walking tree is a kind of positive guy — source of the only moments of visual poetry, if you can call it that — though he has no drives of his own and seems to exist only to help the others. He’s a dendritic Magic Negro — or Magic Tree-Gro.

Oh, the other thing that made me wary of it was that the director, James Gunn, made SUPER, which I hated. God. Just remembering it. How anything with the delightful Ellen Page could be so horrible to watch I can’t think. Kind of makes me want to drive a car over my head, just remembering it. And I can’t even drive.

He’s basically redeemed himself — GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY easily surpasses the low expectations I had. It has Henry Portrait (which is what we have to call actor Michael Rooker) painted blue, with a screw foe a tooth and what looks like a headlight emerging through his scalp. It has a planet called Morag. It has a soundtrack structured around an 80s mixtape of super sounds of the seventies. It has Zoe Saldana (so versatile — first she was blue, now she’s green!) pronouncing the word “doom” as “dume” for no reason. It has a mining colony inside the severed head of a god. It has John C. Reilly. Mainly, it has decided what it thinks of its characters, which is that they’re “not 100% dicks.” And that saves it from being SUPER.

I generally try to see some contemporary relevance in these things — this one seems to be an American fantasy vision of Israel as a sort of Epcot Center world, besieged by vari-hued genocidal barbarians and protecting itself with a sophisticated aerial defense system. Unfortunate timing, then, but nobody seems to mind.

The Disney propaganda cartoon DER FUEHRER’S FACE, with its insistent Spike Jones score, is one of the more startling cultural emanations from the American war effort. Donald (above) plays a sort of Good Soldier Schweik of the Third Reich, persecuted on all sides by his Nazi superiors. It’s interesting that the film’s argument against Hitler is basically that Germans are less well-off, in terms of finances and access to consumer goods, than their American counterparts, an argument that would be quickly adapted to fit the Soviet Union once the war was over (see NINOTCHKA for a particularly entertaining example of this) and has been trotted out again to explain the motivations of Al-Qaida (see Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics response to 9:11).

Disney was always the most conservative animation studio politically, even if they were radical artistically: when Leni Riefenstahl visited Hollywood before the war, no studio head would meet with her… except Disney. Of course, most of the other guys were of Eastern European Jewish origins, whereas Disney was of German WASP descent, but still… the guy should’ve paid attention more, one feels.

Tex Avery’s BLITZ WOLF, on the other hand, is devoid of any ideology — the Hitlerian wolf is simply the baddie. This is undoubtedly the most entertaining of the anti-Nazi cartoons, due to Avery’s robust rejection of politics in favour of visual anarchy, with Hitler as the victim. Chuck Jones, who was admittedly a confirmed professional and personal confabulator, claims that when MGM toon boss Fred Quimby looked over Avery’s shoulder to see what he was drawing, he quailed: “I don’t think you should be quite so nasty to Mr. Hitler: after all, we don’t know who’s going to win this war.”

In this week’s edition of The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook, I examine the work of Robert Clampett and his Hitler smackdown GREMLIN FROM THE KREMLIN.

I’m indebted to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for the title of this post. I think it comes from an old copy of The Demon, and it stuck in my mind because I thought it was amusing. (Apparently I’m wrong about the provenance — see comments section.) Any title that seeks grandeur by shuffling the words around (THE RIVER WILD) makes me think of that Dorothy Parker line about “The Play Terrible.”

Let’s be clear — DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS is a B-picture. The opening credit, “Spartan Productions” is hilariously apt.

But D.G.F.M. doesn’t actually fit the “so-bad-it’s-good” paradigm, which is fortunate, because that’s become rather a boring formulation. In fact, bits of the film are genuinely excellent: there’s a really beautiful flying saucer, complete with spinning bit; a smashing robot; a sexy space girl in slinky dominatrix uniform; two more human women of interest to genre fans; and John Laurie, primarily known in Britain for his role in the sitcom Dad’s Army, but familiar to American cineastes for his appearnaces in THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP.

Indeed, considering it’s a sci-fi thriller, there’s more than a whiff of situation comedy about DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS. More on this aspect later.

The bad bits of the film — the lethargic, stay-at-home plot, the indecisive villainess who should be driving the story but keeps dithering, leading man Hugh McDermott’s hideous face — are pretty bad, and sometimes annoying. The combination of good and bad elements is sort of enjoyable and exciting. You never know whether you’re going to be tickled or stabbed, entertainmentwise. It’s like a night out in Glasgow.

The “action” unfolds at a guest house in the Scottish highlands, host to more drama than is typically the case with such establishments, in my experience. A glamorous London fashion model fleeing a doomed relationship is already in residence — this is Hazel Court in her second fantasy film (she’d already done THE GHOST SHIP for Vernon Sewell two years earlier). Then a convicted wife-murderer, escaped from prison, arrives and is sheltered by barmaid Adrienne Corri (another horror/sci-fi regular, best known for being denuded by droogs in CLOCKWORK ORANGE, an Edinburgh-born Scots-Italian beauty who also worked for Preminger, Lean, Renoir…). Challenged to explain why this traveller has no money, she improvises a tale about him bending over to try and catch a salmon, then straightening up to find his wallet gone. The old “fish thief” story — very convincing.

Already we have the tea-obsessed housekeeper and her drunkard husband (John Laurie, natch) and a young nephew from London. Soon, a car-sharing Irish astrophycisist and American journalist turn up. It’s quite a houseful even before the alien invasion begins.

Prof. Hennessey tries to warm his hands on a spaceship.

The American is actually another Edinburgh-born actor, Hugh McDermott, but his accent seems to have taken a transatlantic turn. I have the same trouble myself, actually. Too many Marvel comics as a kid.

Then the saucer lands. And this is the off-season!

Our space vixen informs the residents that she’s come to pilfer our men, replacing the ones who were nuked in the Big Martian Sex War. She does this while ceaselessly, pointlessly walking up and down, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, which is mildly freaky and kind of effective. Then she tells them they’re surrounded by an invisible barrier and can’t escape — the scientist tries and comes back with a gashed forehead, having walked into it. “I believe what my brain tells me to believe,” he cries, on more than one occasion. He should stop listening, his brain is a fool.

The humes act up, so Mars-Gal shows them her robot, and it’s a beauty. It wantonly discomouferates things, like Gort from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, three years earlier. One of those coincidences, I expect. Fiona and I were delighted by the robots design, pure Japanese tin toy. And his impressive HEFT. “That terrible robot!” cries Corri. “He’s not, he’s smashing!” shouted Fiona back at her.

The Martian, Nyah, is Patricia Laffan, who played Poppaea in QUO VADIS?, so this may have seemed a bit of a come-down, but she throws herself into it with more sneering superiority than anybody’s ever seen. This is the role she’ll be remembered for. Did she have an inkling of this as she slunk around the tiny set in her erotic space-wear? She’s first seen evaporating a balding wee man, a stereotypical “little worm”, in fact, the image of the masochistic bank manager of suburban sexual legend. She’s also reminiscent of another space-domme, the legendary Supreme Commander Servalan from the B.B.C.’s fondly-remembered but slightly crap Blake’s Seven. Interestingly, Servalan was played by another ex-Hammer glamour queen, the unconventionally beautiful Jacqueline Pearce (PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, THE REPTILE). Pearce is still unconventionally beautiful and still acts, while also working in a monkey sanctuary.

Anyway, returning to the monkey sanctuary that is DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS: I felt that Nyah’s power is considerably diminished by her inability to make up her mind. It may be a Martian’s prerogative, but it doesn’t help the dramatic arc…

Prof. Hennessey tries to warm his hands on a spaceship. Again.

Basically, the dramatic part of the story all unfolds while the saucer is being repaired by “Charlie” the robot. (Not a very Martian name, I’d have thought, although maybe it’s actually spelled “Chaghrrl-A” or something.) During the course of this little pit-stop, Nyah first freezes Corri, then un-freezes her, hypnotises the murderer and makes him go all murderous (doesn’t seem like much of an achievement, but still), abducts the small boy, then releases him, takes the scientist aboard her ship for a little tour, allowing him to gather intelligence to use against them, then announces that she will take one of the men as a guide to help her find her way around London. This conjures amusing images of her quietly landing in Camden Town and wandering the streets in her space garb, unnoticed by the general populace.

The film then allows the characters time to furiously debate who should make the supreme sacrifice by going with Nyah and attempting to sabotage her saucer in mid-flight. But this is a pointless scene, since Nyah has just told them SHE will be making the choice. It’s downright weird, this.

Predictably, Bobby Murderer gets selected so he can redeem himself and the Earth is saved and the landlady gets the kettle on. Suddenly I got the feeling I’d been watching A Very Special Episode of Father Ted. The scientist looks a bit like an older Ted. There’s the dissolute drunkard. And the tea-obsessed housekeeper. Admittedly, there are more babes and spacecraft than usual…

“Now I think we all REALLY need a cup of tea!”

The film is also a fine entry in the gather-in-the-pub-as-the-world-ends school of science fiction, a substrain unique to Britain. See also SHAUN OF THE DEAD, THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING, and several of the QUATERMASS films. See them before you see this, actually. But see this anyway.

Shadowplay would like to thank Huckleberry Hound for the word “discomouferate”.